Emilio Perez, the current artist in residence at the Lux Art Institute, attracts an audience as he works on a large painting. CHARLIE NEUMAN • U-T photos “As Long As I Can See” is one of a dozen paintings by Perez on view through the end of the year at the Lux Art Institute in Encinitas. Perez uses a knife to peel away sections of paint as he works on his large project at Lux. — Charlie Neuman

The day after artist Emilio Perez arrived at Lux Art Institute in early November, he did two things: He started on a large-scale, three-panel painting, and he went surfing at Swami’s.

“I’m an OK surfer, but it’s not like I grew up in Southern California,” Perez said. “I’m going to be the kook out in the lineup.”

It’s clear, however, that Perez — who was born in 1972 in New York, grew up in Miami and now works in Brooklyn — is no poser. His most recent exhibition (“Rivers Always Meet the Sea”) was at Paris’ Galerie Lelong, and last year he had solo shows at Lelong’s New York gallery and the CTRL Gallery in Houston. Lelong is also showcasing his art in its space at Art Basel Miami Beach, which closes today.

Despite the enigmatic titles to his paintings (“There’s a Baby in the Deep End” and “The Rooster That Never Crows” are among a dozen pieces at Lux), Perez is an artist who creates genre-defying work that has no agenda and isn’t about anything — except the sheer joy and exuberance of painting itself.

“The way I look at it, it’s painting for the sake of painting,” said Perez, whose pieces are in the permanent collection of his hometown museum, the Miami Art Museum. “I’ve developed a dynamic sort of process where I can grow and flex and do the stuff I want to do. As to what the meaning is, or what you see in it, that’s really up to the viewer.”

Evolution of an artist

While most painters work in an additive manner, placing layer upon layer upon layer of paint to create a finished piece, Perez’s distinguishing quality is he creates his work by subtracting layers.

In creating his energy-infused paintings, Perez first applies a background (solid in his earlier works, multicolored in his more recent pieces). Then he paints over it with a thick coating of white paint. On top of that he applies swirls of color. And then he takes out his knife and starts cutting out tiny lines and shapes, revealing the layers underneath. He will paint some more, cut some more, paint some more, cut some more in a process that can take weeks, even if each step is done quickly and spontaneously.

“If I planned it out ahead of time, it wouldn’t be the same,” Perez said. “People ask: ‘Do you know what you are going to do?’ And I have no idea. In developing my work over the years, I’ve found that any forced changes I’ve tried to make have never been successful. The work has really evolved on its own — sometimes not as quickly as I’ve wanted it to, but it’s a natural process. I can’t push it.”

He started playing with canvasses early, using his mother’s paints while growing up in Miami, where his family finally settled after moving from New York and then Brazil.

“We’d go to Chesapeake Bay in the summers, and she’d find these shells,” he said. “They had these giant clam shells, piles of them, and she’d get a bunch and paint birds on them. Then she’d make a base out of rocks and shells and stuff and throw them together. I was always painting around her.”

While attending the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and the University of Florida’s New World School of the Arts, Perez experimented with other mediums, but he always returned to painting.

“I’m impatient,” he said. “I need immediacy to what I do. If I did video, I’d have to shoot the video, then I’d have to edit it and do all these different things in order to get a finished product. It’s the same with sculpture. If I did sculpture, I’d want to carve something out of marble. I can’t make a carving out of marble just like that. Painting is a way I can get this sort of instant gratification.”

But even conventional painting was not fast enough for his short attention span. He couldn’t wait for the paint to dry.

“I just started drawing on the paint when it was wet,” he said. “So I was moving paint around. Moving paint around became sort of scraping, and then sort of carving, and then sort of making marks on wet paint. One thing led to another.”

Art as ‘a dialogue’

While his paintings resist categorization beyond their abstract, nonrepresentational nature, his influences are decidedly representational, in particular Baroque painting, which inspires not only his approach but also his palette.

“I’ve spent a lot of time in Italy,” he said. “When I’m there and looking at a fresco or some Baroque painting, there’s always all this movement, turmoil, and all this stuff. So I try to do the same thing, only in an abstract form, without figurative elements.”

In his bursts of colors and sweeping lines, it’s not hard to imagine unintended figures and shapes. The most common allusion in his work is the ocean, given its fluid, dynamic and constantly shifting nature. Perez acknowledges its influence, but not its presence in his paintings.

“I grew up in Miami, so I grew up on the water,” he said. “It’s not a subject of my paintings, but it’s certainly something that gives a lot of energy to me.”

Even the way his process works, the way he cuts a painting in reaction to his previous brush strokes, he sees as analogous to being in the water and adapting to the waves.

“It becomes a dialogue,” he said. “The application of paint is so fast, so loose, and comes so much from the subconscious that when I’m cutting, I’m actually reacting to the things I did with the brush strokes …

“It’s the same as if you were swimming in the ocean and you have to react to this force of nature pushing you around.”

Aside from the process he applies to his paintings, the design and content of his work somehow emerge spontaneously. He has no systems, no grids, nothing external to fall back on if his subconscious refuses to speak — or paint. It would seem to be a recipe for artist’s block.

“That’s not going to happen,” Perez said. “But one thing I don’t have any control of is the art market and what people want.”

He took a break from Lux to attend the art fair in Miami and talk to gallery owners and collectors before he finishes his Encinitas residency, and that large painting, this week.

“It’s a scary business,” he said. “There are swings in what people are buying, and you have to be smart and weather through it. I’ve always felt, even before I got to this point in my career, that the most important thing was making the work.

“If you aren’t making the work, what do you have? Everything else is falling into place as long as I continue to make the work.”